In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell distorts the historical record to suit modern sensibilities
- Written by Jessica O'Leary, Research Fellow, Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University
In her latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell takes readers to Renaissance Italy. Lush metaphors and minute description of life in ducal palaces abound in her reimagining of the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici, and his Spanish wife, Eleonora di Toledo.
In 1558, Lucrezia wed Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. It was a marriage of political convenience. Lucrezia was 13 years old. Less than three years later, she was dead. The young duchess died of tuberculosis, but rumours abounded that Alfonso had killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage.
Review: The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O'Farrell (Hachette).
Francesco I De Medici – Bronzino.
Public domain
Allori’s Lucrezia, however, is not smiling. Her serious gaze shows no creasing at the edges, her lips curl downwards, and her brows are frozen. Instead, her portrait displays the opulence of her family. She is dressed in black velvet and wears a string of pearls. She has a diadem, a belt and a brooch of gold, set with rubies, pearls and emeralds. Her hand delicately rests upon a crystal orb set upon a marble table.
Lucrezia’s only surviving contemporaneous portrait inspires Browning and O’Farrell in significantly different ways. Browning’s dramatic monologue is centred on Alfonso’s resentment; O’Farrell is interested in the young duchess’s subjectivity. What emerges from O'Farrell’s novel is a literary portrait of an isolated and inexperienced young woman, who knows little beyond the palace walls. O’Farrell depicts the pressures faced by dynastic wives with a deft hand, while imaginatively recreating the finery and personalities of Renaissance Italy.
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An imaginative connection
O’Farrell has claimed that she was struck by the sad circumstances of Lucrezia’s marriage. Her imaginative connection to the duchess is palpable in the way she takes us into the mind of Lucrezia. But, as with much beautifully drawn historical fiction, the historical facts have been significantly altered and embellished to appeal to a 21st-century audience.
The wedding of Alfonzo and Lucrezia was a late consequence of the Italian Wars (1494-1559), a series of conflicts fought between the monarchs of France and Spain for dominance of the Italian peninsula. The Spanish emerged victorious and former French allies, like the aristocratic Estes, were forced to make a series of concessions as part of the peace treaties.
One such concession was the union of the Este dynasty with the Spanish-aligned Medici family. It was initially proposed that Alfonso marry Lucrezia’s older sister Maria, but Maria died in 1557 before the marriage could take place.
O’Farrell’s novel is replete with interactions between Alfonso and Lucrezia, but in reality the couple barely saw one another. Alfonso left Florence three days after their wedding and rarely corresponded with his wife, who lived with her mother and her sister Isabella for two years in relative isolation at the Medici palazzo.
An 18th century image of Lucrezia de’ Medici by Raimondo Faucci.
Public domain
O’Farrell’s prose draws the reader in, inviting us to sympathise with the young duchess. The Marriage Portrait rails against the dynastic system that produced a child bride. The novel is extraordinarily successful in this regard. O'Farrell has written an effective feminist account of the trauma of political marriages for inexperienced girls who have no notion of love and know only obedience and duty.
Yet inscribing Lucrezia’s story with this kind of sentiment risks erasing the real Lucrezia. It replaces her with a character who meets the modern expectations of a naïve young heroine who suffers a tragic fate.
The Marriage Portrait reflects the way popular culture tends to romanticise women from this period. Such reimagining can make it difficult for historians to communicate the complexities of past lives to modern audiences. Even when depictions are ostensibly positive, in the sense they reconstruct the agency of young women in contexts where they had very little, the heavy-handed contrasts between oppression and freedom do not allow much room for the shades of grey present in early modern courts.
Popular depictions of young women from the early modern era as spirited and driven say something about how our society tends to project its moral concerns onto the past. In 21st-century Western societies, pop culture tells us women should reject misogynistic structures and seek out opportunities to be themselves. When we superimpose such expectations on different historical periods, we get a distorted portrait of individuals like Lucrezia.
O’Farrell’s novel is a page-turner and a fine example of literary historical fiction, but readers should keep in mind that giving a voice to forgotten individuals of the past is a delicate enterprise. Modern hopes for a character may not always align with the character’s hopes.
Authors: Jessica O'Leary, Research Fellow, Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University 
